Chapter 339: Trust and Wariness

I’d left Kunta in Daisy’s care, which not too long ago would’ve made me uneasy in a way I couldn’t quite talk myself out of.

Daisy and Rebecca were the quieter ones, the ones who didn’t carry weapons like a second skin or throw themselves into a fight without thinking twice. Putting either of them alone with a Starakian, even one who looked completely human at a glance, had felt like a bad idea when the thought first crossed my mind. The kind of bad idea that sounds reasonable until something goes wrong and you’re standing there wondering why you didn’t trust your gut.

But I understood Kunta better now.

Enough, at least.

Underneath all the sharp remarks and the casual arrogance, she was just a teenage girl. Strange circumstances, different world, different species, but still just a girl trying to get back to someone she cared about. The robot dog was a concern, sure, but she wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to aim Sonny at Rebecca or Daisy. They’d somehow managed to become friends in the span of a few days, the three of them, which was either remarkable or a sign that teenagers were the same across the entire universe.

"Finally convinced yourself Kunta isn’t actually dangerous?" Rachel said beside me, reading the shift in my expression the way she always did, tilting her head with a small smile as we started down the stairs.

"Something like that," I admitted. "Mostly I’m just glad for Daisy’s sake. Elena and Alisha were really the only close friends she had, her whole world in terms of people who actually knew her. Without them around she’s been a little lost, even if she doesn’t say it. Seeing her like that with Rebecca and Kunta.... it’s good."

"It really is," Rachel agreed softly. "She needed that."

"Still." I kept my voice serious. "We can’t drop our guard completely, Rachel. Both of them came here with a specific purpose, tracking down Symbiote Hosts and extracting them. Whether the word they’d use is ’kill’ or not doesn’t really change the outcome."

"They don’t exactly want to kill us, Ryan—"

"Pulling a Symbiote out of its host by force will kill the host. That’s just the reality of it." I glanced at her. "I’m not entirely sure how it works for you and the others since you’re carrying fragments rather than a full bond, maybe the risk is different, maybe it isn’t. But they know what the outcome is for a full host and they came here anyway. That matters." I paused. "And Dullahan is on their list. Kunta cannot find out about our Symbiote. Not for as long as we can help it."

Rachel was quiet for a moment, her expression settling into something more complicated. "I won’t say anything," she said. Then, softer — "That poor girl is just trying to get back to her friend, Ryan."

"I know," I said. "And honestly, the best thing that could happen after that reunion is the two of them leaving and not coming back."

Rachel gave me a look. "That’s a little cold."

"It’s practical. I’m not trying to collect risks." I let a beat pass. "You might be right that Kunta wouldn’t hurt us. Probably. But Zakthar is a completely different question and right now we know almost nothing about him, except that he’s somehow ended up in Callighan’s custody, which makes absolutely no sense to me and gives me a bad feeling I can’t shake."

"The Hotel, right?" Rachel said. "Isn’t that already part of the plan, taking back that Hotel and getting Zakthar out in the process?"

"Yeah," I said. "That’s the plan."

I let a few steps of silence pass before continuing.

"But Rachel, I want to be straight with you about something. Getting Zakthar out alive isn’t about reuniting him with Kunta. That’s not why I want him." I kept my tone level but clear. "He’s a Starakian. He came here specifically to hunt Dullahan. I’m not about to hand him his freedom and wish him well."

What I didn’t say out loud, but turned over quietly in my head as we descended, was the rest of it. Leaving Zakthar in Callighan’s hands wasn’t an option either. He knew too much, about Symbiotes, about Hosts, about things that Callighan had no business knowing. Whatever arrangement existed between them, whether they’d threatened him into cooperation or made him some kind of deal, it didn’t matter much. The result was the same. He was already feeding something to Callighan’s side, one way or another.

He wasn’t someone I could trust. But he also wasn’t someone I could afford to leave where he was.

And then there was Emily.

That was the part I kept circling back to, the part that made leaving Zakthar in play in any capacity, feel like standing next to a lit fuse. He knew about Emily. Whether he’d act on that knowledge, whether he’d even care about us if we kept Dullahan’s name out of it entirely and let him walk, I honestly couldn’t say. Maybe he’d take the out and disappear. Maybe.

But Emily wasn’t something I could gamble on. Not even close.

"Ryan."

Rachel’s hand found mine in the middle of the stairwell, warmly, and we both stopped without discussing it.

She looked at me for a moment before speaking, choosing her words carefully the way she did when something actually mattered to her.

"I know I’ve been softer about Kunta than I should be," she said. "And I still mean it, I don’t want to hurt her. She’s just a child to me, Ryan. Mentally she seems even younger than Rebecca sometimes. More naive. Like it’s obvious she was never really built for the kind of thing she came here to do."

I couldn’t argue with that. Shannon, who was younger by years, carried herself better than Kunta actually. Like Kunta had been sheltered from the harder edges of things, wherever she’d grown up, and had followed Zakthar out here without fully understanding what she was walking into.

"But I understand," Rachel continued, her voice steadying. "We have to be wary. We have to be strong, and yes, selfish sometimes. To keep ourselves intact. To protect what we have."

"Yeah," I said. "We do."

"So I need you to know that you’re not carrying that alone," she said simply.

"I know." I squeezed her hand. "I do."

She nodded, but something in her expression shifted, a faint shadow, like a thought she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. "I’m sorry, though. For letting my feelings about Kunta cloud it. You’re right to think the way you do, always looking further ahead, accounting for things the rest of us want to believe aren’t problems yet." She paused. "In that way, Sydney and Christopher are much closer to how you think. I’m not."

She said it without self-pity, just honestly, and it sat in the air between us.

She wasn’t wrong. Sydney had always had that edge, a kind of strategic coldness she could switch on when the situation demanded it despite how always playful she was. And Christopher, after everything that happened in Jackson Township, after Mei getting taken, after watching Callighan’s reach extend further than any of us had expected, he’d changed pretty quickly as well for the better. The old approach wasn’t enough anymore and he knew it. He’d stopped pretending otherwise.

"Rachel." I turned toward her. "I don’t need you to be like that. Not even a little." I smiled, wry enough that she’d know I meant it. "You’re the reason I don’t completely lose the plot. You keep just enough of the human side of this running that I don’t forget what we’re actually doing any of this for. I need that. Really."

She laughed softly and reached up to poke me lightly on the side of the head. "Don’t get sentimental on me now."

But then she held my gaze, more serious. "Just don’t let the wariness hollow you out. There’s a version of strong that stops feeling anything, and that’s not you, and it shouldn’t become you." She tilted her head slightly. "People here trust you, Ryan. Not just because of what you can do. Because of how you use it. Because they know what kind of man you are underneath all of it. Some of them have probably already put together that you and Gaspar share the same type of power, and most of them didn’t even flinch. That’s not nothing. That’s everything."

"Yeah," I said quietly.

It was true. Even Brad, who never missed a chance to get under my skin, still talked to me like I was someone he could mouth off to and walk away from. In his own obnoxious way, that was almost a compliment. He knew, on some level, that I wasn’t the kind of person who’d kill him just because I could.

Rachel smiled at my answer, let go of my hand and my thoughts both, and kept moving down the stairs. I fell in behind her.

We stepped outside into the open air, the sounds of the street and the Boardwalk crowd settling around us like something almost normal.

"You haven’t really spent time with the Boardwalk people yet," I said, glancing at Rachel. "You should. They’re good people, most of them."

"I’ve seen some of them already, haven’t I?" she asked, tilting her face slightly toward the sun.

"Yeah," I said. "Molly, Maribel, Shannon, back when we were scouting Atlantic City."

"So how has life been, living over there on the Boardwalk?" She asked, curious.

"Pretty good, honestly," I said.

What I very much left out was Maribel running me ragged every morning the moment she’d figured out my strength had a higher ceiling than everyone else’s, treating me like a one-man construction crew with a smile on her face. Or Marlon, who had spent the better part of three days working out what felt like every personal grievance he’d ever had directly onto my body during sparring.

Pretty good, yeah...

Well, at the very least I managed to make a lot of acquaintances and build some kind of trust with a lot of people there already.